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Image copyrightSUPPLIEDImage captionRotting bread was among the food found in the kitchen

One of China’s most prestigious high schools has been the target of public anger after piles of expired mouldy food were found in its canteen kitchen.

Mouldy bread, rotting meat and seafood were discovered at the Chengdu No 7 Experimental High School.

One parent told the BBC of his horror and disgust, saying the food was “stinky and disgusting” and compared it to pig slop.

The school has now apologised, saying it is deeply “embarrassed”.

Food safety scandals are not uncommon in China and they often leave authorities scrambling to defuse public outrage.

How did they discover the food?

The scandal first emerged when a small group of parents were on Monday invited to attend a tree planting event at the private high school in Chengdu, the capital city of China’s Sichuan province.

While at the school, a group of parents discovered mouldy bread, rotting meat and seafood items in the canteen kitchen canteen.

It is not clear why exactly they chose to stop by the kitchen, but one parent that the BBC’s Lulu Luo spoke to referenced an incident earlier last November where numerous school children came down with stomach-aches, constipation and various other ailments.

Image copyrightSUPPLIEDImage captionWhat looks like seafood and meat were seen in cardboard boxes

“[The items looked like they had] been in a freezer for years, [it looked] like zombie meat,” the father, who has a daughter and son enrolled in the school said.

It said the parents had “severely disrupted” traffic and insulted the police. They were later released on the same day.

‘Why should they be trusted with anything?’

Stephen McDonell, BBC China correspondent

People overseas sometimes mistakenly think that there are not many protests in China. Actually, acts of dissent break out quite often and can erupt suddenly.

If family members are harmed, especially when under the care of a school or a kindergarten or a hospital, then orderly, calm communities can transform with scenes of anger spilling out onto the streets.

Faulty medicine, tainted milk powder, investment scams and perceived abuse of students under the care of teachers have all triggered public anger directed at the officials whose job it is to keep the community safe.

What has the school said?

The school is one of the most prestigious in China and had in the past been named among China’s “Top 10 outstanding private schools”.

It said that those responsible would be dealt with by the law, saying it was “embarrassed” by the incident and that it would not happen again.

However, the parent the BBC spoke to said the case was not an “isolated incident”, saying that the same supplier catered to “over 100,000 students from across 20 schools”.

Wenjiang district government – the district in Chengdu that the school is in – issued a statement on Wednesday that said eight people responsible for food safety at the school were being investigated by authorities.

It said that 36 students from the school had been admitted into the local hospital for a check-up -all were later discharged.

The district government also said that the raw food would be sent for testing, adding that a “comprehensive and in-depth investigation” would be held into the matter.

The “ChinaSat 6C” satellite is launched by a Long March-3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, March 10, 2019. It will provide high-quality radio and TV transmission services. (Xinhua/Guo Wenbin)

XICHANG, March 10 (Xinhua) — China Sunday sent a new communication satellite into orbit from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China’s Sichuan Province.

The “ChinaSat 6C” satellite was launched at 0:28 a.m. Beijing Time by a Long March-3B carrier rocket. It will provide high-quality radio and TV transmission services.

The satellite has been sent to the geostationary orbit, and can cover China, Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific island countries.

The satellite was developed by the China Academy of Space Technology, and will be operated by the China Satellite Communications Co., Ltd.

The launch marks the 300th mission of the Long March carrier rocket series developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

Tears of joy as hundreds turn out to welcome home the lost boy of their village

DNA samples crack the case after decades of heartache

Chinese kidnap victim reunited with parents after 31 years

25 Feb 2019

16 Feb 2019

The tearful moment a man is finally reunited with his parents 31 years after he was abducted as a three-year-old. Photo: Weibo

A man who was abducted as a child 31 years ago was finally reunited with his parents in a celebration which included hundreds of people from surrounding villages in Sichuan province, southwest China.

Qin Yujie – whose given name was Cheng Xueping – knelt and sobbed as he hugged his long-lost parents in Chengjiawan village, surrounded by “Welcome Home” banners and the noise of firecrackers.

“I have been looking for you for years and couldn’t find a clue,” Qin told his weeping parents Cheng Jiguang and Gaolingzhen at their reunion on Friday, according to the Western China City Daily newspaper.

As well as the joy of seeing their son again, the Chengs were also able to meet Qin’s wife and children for the first time as hundreds of people gathered around them, many of them in tears.

Qin was three years old in 1988 when he was snatched from a construction site in Guizhou province, southern China, where his parents were working. They searched frantically for their son over many hours that day and, since then, have spent their life savings and borrowed money to travel all over China looking for traces of their son.

Eventually they provided DNA samples to a national database established by the police to assist in the search for China’s many abducted children.

After three decades they finally learned the truth – that their son had been abducted and sold to a village in north China’s Hebei province.

In 2018, a DNA sample Qin provided to his employers yielded an unexpected result. Sichuan police were alerted to a match between Qin’s DNA sample and Cheng’s, his birth father.

Police tracked him down and contacted the Chengs to provide another DNA sample to be sure of the results and, in February this year, the new test confirmed that Cheng and Gao were indeed Qin’s biological parents.

A video of their emotional reunion has been making the rounds on Chinese social media.

The abduction of women and children is a common crime in China. In December 2018 two child traffickers, Zhang Weiping and Zhou Rongping, were sentenced to death for their role in eight separate cases, involving the sale of nine children between 2003 and 2005.

In one particularly brutal case, their gang broke into a rented home, tied up a woman and took away her son to be sold through a middleman, police said. Zhang, Zhou and the other gang members were finally detained in 2016.

In recent years, there have been several official as well as grassroots efforts to help abducted children find their parents. The Ministry of Public Security established an official system called Tuanyuan in 2016 which sends alerts of missing children’s information through social media platforms and mobile phone texts, similar to the “Amber Alert” system in the US.

As of May 2018, Chinese media reported the system had published information about 3,053 missing children and helped find 2,980 of them.

On Baobeihuijia, a grassroots website run by volunteers, there are still 43,858 families looking for their children and 39,446 people looking for their families.